Lexie Ippolito opened a box in August expecting to find her mother's 2009 wedding dress, carefully preserved for her own upcoming wedding. Instead, the 28-year-old bride-to-be found a stranger's gown staring back at her, setting off a monthslong search that would eventually connect two families across the country.
Ippolito, who grew up in Chicago's Jefferson Park neighborhood and now lives in Boston, had hoped to wear her mother Renee's David's Bridal Michelangelo-style T8589 gown for her wedding celebrations, particularly at her rehearsal dinner, according to the Chicago Tribune. Renee and Mario Ippolito had married in Portage Park on April 18, 2009, and the family had kept the preserved gown stored away for more than a decade, waiting for the day Lexie would need it for her own ceremony at Holy Name Cathedral.
That plan hit a snag when Ippolito realized the dress inside the box wasn't her mother's at all. The gown had been sent for preservation by Memories Gown Preservation in Houston back in March 2010, and somewhere along the way, the Ippolito family picked up the wrong dress from a Schaumburg David's Bridal location, the Tribune reports.
A Search That Spread Across Social Media
Rather than let the mystery sit, Ippolito posted about the missing gown on TikTok and Facebook, asking for help tracking it down. Her TikTok posts drew thousands of comments and likes, while her Facebook post collected almost 2,000 likes and was shared by dozens of other brides-to-be, per the same report. Several brides with similar dresses even offered to lend Ippolito their own gowns for her wedding.
The breakthrough came last Friday, when Ippolito found a small blue embroidered tag sewn into the lining of the mystery dress. The tag identified a couple named Heidi and Jake, along with their wedding date of May 19, 2007. Armed with that information, Ippolito searched online for the couple's wedding date and found the bride's obituary, discovering the gown belonged to Heidi Webber McClellan of Oroville, California.
A Family's Decade-Long Grief Over a Missing Dress
Webber McClellan had married in 2007 and died in October 2009 after a rejected bone marrow transplant, according to the Tribune's reporting. Her mother, Sue Webber-Brown, had used a David's Bridal wedding dress preservation package for her daughter's gown and had long believed it was lost in the mail on its way back from preservation in Texas.
Ippolito contacted Webber-Brown's family through Facebook, and the reunion hit hard. Webber-Brown told the Tribune that Ippolito's effort to track down her family felt overwhelming, and she described the possibility of finding her daughter's original dress as a possible second miracle.
How Two Dresses Got Swapped
Memories Gown Preservation, the dry cleaning business that handled both dresses, has since closed and was sold to Wedding Gown Preservation Co. in Endicott, New York. That company's owner, Colby Schapiro, whose family business acquired Memories Gown Preservation in December 2025, said mistaken dress swaps during preservation are rare, especially with modern tracking technology, since garments are typically marked with identical identification barcodes that remain with them through the cleaning and pressing process, which can take several weeks.
Wedding Gown Preservation Co. traces its roots to 1913, when Sara and Joseph Schapiro began preserving and altering gowns in Endicott, New York. The company describes itself as a fourth-generation family business, now operated by the Schapiro family. That history gives the firm a long connection to the heirloom-preservation trade, even as the 2010 records Ippolito needs have not carried over with the acquisition of Memories Gown Preservation. The company’s history
Wedding Gown Preservation Co. now works with David's Bridal on preservation services, but Schapiro said the company has no records from Memories Gown Preservation dating back to 2010. According to the Tribune, the two dresses were just 120 ticket ID numbers apart during preservation, a gap Ippolito is now trying to close herself. She said she plans to contact all 120 of the Memories Gown Preservation customers whose ID tags fell between the two dresses, and she's urging any bride who used David's Bridal preservation services in early 2010 to double-check the contents of their own dress boxes.
The mix-up also highlights a gap between a gown’s monetary value and its personal worth. Memories Gown Preservation’s posted FAQ says its liability for a lost or damaged dress is limited to the least of several measures, including the declared value, replacement cost or repair cost; it also says sentimental value is not counted in that calculation. The FAQ does not establish what terms applied to these 2010 orders, but it shows how the company framed compensation for loss. Memories’ stated liability policy
David's Bridal did not return the Tribune's email request for comment on the mix-up.
David’s Bridal’s current preservation kit illustrates how the service is packaged today: it includes prepaid return shipping and a $500 declared value, with additional declared value available as an optional upgrade. Those current terms do not establish what coverage applied to the gowns processed in 2010, but they underscore why identifying the original order paperwork may matter as Ippolito searches for her mother’s dress. The current kit’s listed coverage
Still Searching, Still Hopeful
As of the week of October 28, Heidi Webber McClellan's dress was expected to arrive back in California, finally returning to the family that had spent years believing it was gone for good. Ippolito, meanwhile, is working with Wedding Gown Preservation Co. to locate her own mother's gown and said she remains hopeful the Michelangelo-style T8589 will eventually turn up.
One Chicago-area family has a wedding dress with decades of sentimental history. A Tribune photo feature previously documented a satin gown that Adele Larson bought from Marshall Field's Brides' Room in 1950 and wore when she married Roy Stoneberg that year, a dress that went on to be worn by eight women in the same family, including Serena Stoneberg at her Chicago wedding in August 2022. For the Ippolito and Webber-Brown families, the hope now is that a single preserved gown can carry just as much meaning once it finally makes its way home.
